I have a quick Ubuntu tip for you today. You’re on the command line and have an image in the directory that you’re currently in. How can you easily view this image without loading Nautilus, browsing to the directory, and opening it from there? It turns out that the answer is very simple.

The default image viewer in Ubuntu is called Eye of Gnome. Using Eye of Gnome, you can quickly view the following images: ani, bmp, gif, ico, jpeg, pcx, png, pnm, ras, svg, tga, tiff, wbmp, xbm, and xpm.

To run Eye of Gnome from the command line, simply run “eog”. So, if you have a file called image.jpg in your current directory, you can simply run the following to view it:

[gaarai@home ~]$ eog image.jpg

Now you never again have to wonder what that image is as you’re browsing around in Terminal.

This tip will work for any distro running Gnome, such as Linux Mint.

Did I help you?